BOOKS
NIGHT THOUGHTS
The poetry of Tomas Tranströmer.
BY DAN CHIASSON
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^ ccording to the London bookies,
.r\..the odds-on favorite to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature this year-at
5 to 1, far outpacing the usual sus-
pects-was Bob Dylan. Dylan is cur-
rently on a European tour, playing to
sold-out soccer stadiums. The tour
schedule suggests that the news would
have reached him in Dublin, perhaps in
some baronial hotel room. I might at
first have felt a slight pang for literature,
whose quiet triumphs never filled an
arena, and whose minions toil while
Dylan counts the clouds from his cliff-
top estate in Malibu. Soon, though, I
would have joined the worldwide cho-
rus ofhallelujahs, for Bob Dylan is a ge-
nius, and there is something undeniably
literary about his genius, and those two
facts together make him more deserv-
ing of this prize than countless pseudo-
notables who have won it in the past.
Instead, the Swedish Academy,
8 which meets in the old Stock Ex-
C2
change Building in central Stockholm,
placed the call to a small apartment
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across town. There Tomas Trans-
trömer, now eighty and the greatest liv-
ing Scandinavian poet, resides with his
wife, Monica. Tranströmer suffered a
stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine,
which robbed him of speech and im-
paired the use of his right ann. Rather
than delivering the customary laureate's
address when he accepts the award, on
December 10th, he will playa piece on
the piano using only his left hand. This
is a form of self-expression that T rans-
trömer has petfected in the years since
his stroke, playing a small repertoire of
compositions for the left hand, some of
them written for Paul Wittgenstein
and other pianists with damaged right
hands, some by Swedish composers
specifically for T ranströmer.
But Tranströmer's primary form of
expression is the taciturn, enigmatic
poetry that he has been writing for sixty
years. The poems are usually short and
muted; his æuvre, collected in "The
Great Enigmà' (translated from the
Swedish by Robin Fulton; New Direc-
Tranströmer, who trained as a psychologist, records the fragility ofconsciousness.
tions; $17.95) and, courtesy of various
translators, in two reissued volumes,
"For the Living and the Dead" (Ecco;
$15.99) and "Selected Poems" (Ecco;
$14.99), is probably smaller than any
previous laureatè s. Here, in its entirety,
is his early poem "Tracks":
2 AM: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in the middle of the plain. Far away,
points of light in a town,
flickering coldly at the horizon.
As when someone has fallen into a
dream so deep
he'll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.
As when someone has fallen into an
illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few
flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny on the horizon.
The train is standing quite still.
2 AM: bright moonlight, few stars.
Like much of Tranströmer's work,
the poem feels like a dreamed meta-
phor for what dreams do, stranding us,
like a train in a plain (the rhyme is
there in the Swedish, too, and suggests
dream logic), in the alien stretches of
our own minds. Here the dream is
"like a dream," a phenomenon that
rhymes itself and, in the process, can-
cels itself: the poem ends where it
began; it remains 2 A.M., and the train
is "quite still," in "the second that's al-
lowed to live for centuries," as Trans-
trömer puts it in another poem.
There have been, among poets,
many psychiatric patients; psycholo-
gists are scarcer. Tranströmer worked
for years as a psychologist, mainly with
juveniles. He was born in 1931 and
brought up by his mother in Stock-
holm. He studied piano as a boy; his
poems match the virtues of music to
the virtues of psychological analysis.
As an adolescent, he was afflicted by
terrors: faces swam in the wallpaper,
the walls ticked as though they might
burst open. He conjures visions like
those in a later poem, 'The Gallery":
I stayed overnight at a motel by the E3.
In my room a smell I'd felt before
In the Asiatic halls of a museum:
masks Tibetan Japanese on a pale wall.
But it's not masks now, it's faces
forcing through the white wall of
oblivion
to breathe, to ask about something.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 31,2011 93